I may well be wrong, but there’s no point in waiting until they dig up and sequence every last body in Eurasia. Time to stick my neck out.

Here’s my current best guess concerning the Indo-European expansion:

It all started pretty far to the East. There, some crazy locals first tamed the horse. I’m thinking that they were something like the Botai culture, riding and hunting horses, but not farmers. They may well have milked those horses – by the way, horse milk is much richer in lactose than human or cow milk.

These early horsemen were genetically similar to the Ancient North Eurasians, or as those who know have dubbed them, Sibermen.

Having horses made them natural raiders, let them expand. Lactose tolerance might have helped.

A fraction of them conquered some farmers (a mixture of Middle Eastern types and others similar to western hunter-gatherers) in the eastern Ukraine, imposed their language, and roared into northern Europe. This accounts for the Centum languages: they have probably some additions from whatever language those Ukie farmers were speaking. Some people from this group (Tocharians) must have made a wrong turn and eventually ended up in Western China. Even today some Uighurs show the mark of those red-headed strangers.

But that centum expansion didn’t come first. Other, earlier kinds of Indo-Europeans had already destroyed the old EEF culture in the Balkans – and although they seem to have had some ANE ancestry, they apparently had very little WHG ancestry. You see mixtures of EEF and ANE in Greece and Albania, but almost no WHG. This has to be the result of a separate, early Indo-European expansion. Looks as if this might have gone on into Anatolia – the Hitties, Luwian, Palaic.

Nor was it the last. There must have been some peoples in the real Indo-European homeland (farther to the east than the Yamna culture) who had not yet conquered a bunch of motley farmers and had remained mostly ANE. Considerably later, now charioteers, some of them moved south, conquered some more Armenian-like farmers (the Bactria-Margiana culture, BMAC, located in the southern part of what used to be Soviet Central Asia, now Trashcanistan) (but no WHG types) and then went on to conquer India and Iran. Some ended up in odd corners like Nuristan and the Chitral Valley: here’s a young Kalash boy.

Both the European Centum expansion and the later Indo-Aryan expansion carried the same lactose-tolerance mutation., which has never been found in aDNA from the EEF farmers. Of course it could have been around in Old Europe, just still rare, but the simplest explanation for finding the same common mutation in Europe and north India is that it was spread by the Indo-Europeans themselves.

The WHG hunters had blue eyes, the same mutation as today, while the early European farmers had SLC24A5, but as of yet I’ve not seen any ancient examples of the alleles that give varied hair color in Europeans. Blondes and redheads are rare in Basques and Sardinians – I’m wondering if the ANE are the source.

100 Responses to Centum and Satem

You can’ get away from the fact that those totally different red and blonde colours are not just found more commonly in the population of north west Europe that elsewhere today, they are ten a penny: the diversity is the norm in Europe. And those photos just emphasise that because no-one thinks there is anything noteworthy about red or blonde hair in Europe.

There were mixtures and conquests but nobody appears to be saying that there was a totally red headed and a wholly blonde popuation, and these mixed with the uniformly black haired populations of the rest of the word. As there are are totally different hair colours like blonde and red in the European populations; from whence the diversity? It seems to me that the only explaination is that novelty and diversity in hair color was what was being selected for in a population. Why? We are not told what this section pressure maybe was and why it only operated on this population, that is apparently thought to be of no interest or relevance .

OK, here is the essential point where I think someone is sticking their neck out like a giraffe. It seems to be being advanced that the hair diversity originally came from a different population to the population with the diversity of eye color. So it is being said the current appearance of Europeans is due to the mixing of two totally different populations which both have striking diverstity in a visible characterstic. (And not clear which had white skin, maybe that is supposed to have originated in a third originally).

Indo-Iranians spread from Sinthashta culture, South East of Yamna I think.

Most likely the expansion in to Iran and India was through elite dominance (like the Mittani) conquest, including things like mercenary bands going in service of a non-Indo-European king, and then taking over the empire. I don’t see a large genetic imprint or population replacement is likely. This would also explain the lack of institutional memory of migration and conquest (it was likely just a few migrants, who wanted to adopt the new lands).

The idea of the east and westward expansions independently conquering farmers is interesting and may solve the issue of shared words for cereal farming in all Indo_European languages while there is no evidence of any such farming in the steppes. They acquired them independently!

Re: 2. Firstly, there was clearly a substantial population replacement in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. I understand that Central Asia was pretty well IE before the Turkic peoples moved in. Secondly, how is there a lack of institutional memory of migration and conquest? Isn’t that what the Rig Veda is?

Re: 3. There was farming on the steppes. Herodotus recorded that the Scythians had a farming caste. Obviously that doesn’t indicate that the farmers were genetically related to the ruling class. Beckwith has other examples of farming, too, as I recall. Also, wouldn’t shared words for cereal farming among dispersed IE languages mean that theyv didn’t acquire them independently?

Re 2, there is no archaelogical evidence for population replacement in India/Iran that corresponds to Indo-European timeline. eg. the decline of the Indus Valley and subsequent eastward migration of Neolithic people is dated roughly 2000 – 1000 BC, but skeletally there are no changes. The genetic marker of the “Ancestral North Indian” people is likely to be the large Neolithic farmer population and not Indo-European at all.

The Rig Veda is almost entirely hymns in praise of the Vedic Gods. There is no mention of migration at all barring a handful of disputed and ambiguous verses. The people who composed it called themselves Aryans and their land the Aryavarta – they never state that they migrated from or to the Aryavarta. There are definitely mentions of wars and victories, but that is not memory of migration. The caricature of the Rig Veda as evidence for bands of conquering nomads is highly overstated. Also the Rig Veda was followed over the next 500-1000 years by thousands of other hymns and expository verses in the subsequent Vedas, and the people who composed those definitely had forgotten any migration from a distant land. (I’m not arguing that there was no migration, just that the memory was lost, as it was lost in Greece for example).

There’s no evidence of population replacement. But judging by the data that the Harappa Ancestry Project put together, there is pretty clearly a layer of Northeastern European admixture, which peaks with Jatts (17%), and is at least 5% in many northern Indian groups (particularly high caste).

And, of course, Aryans wouldn’t have been pure “Northeast Europeans” when they reached India. Admixture with farming groups in modern Turkestan could have resulted in admixture which today shows up as Caucasian, Baloch, and even South Indian. Modern day Central Asians show a lot of admixture from all of these groups after all.

In a way, the genetic situation in India could be confounded the same way it is in Europe. There’s reason to believe the pre-Iranian population in Central Asia was closely related genetically to the group that brought Near Eastern agriculture into India (e.g., both would count as Ancient North Indian). If the Aryans admixed with them, and then in turn admixed to some degree with the already mixed Harappans, then it would be hard to disentangle the two threads. Just the same way that the mixed Indo-Europeans in Europe make it hard to disentangle the degree to which population replacement versus hybridization occurred in Northern Europe.

” If the Aryans admixed with them, and then in turn admixed to some degree with the already mixed Harappans, then it would be hard to disentangle the two threads.”

Yes if a migration/invasion pattern has an underlying mechanic (e.g. it takes c. 400 years for a source region to build up an invasion level of population surplus) then you might get a repeated cycle of migrations/invasions from the same source region creating layers of similar genetics in the target region.

I have thought about Greg’s suggestion that there is an IE golden family and I think it is possible that it extended into Egypt.

Some Indo-Euros ruled over the ancient kingdoms in the Fertile Crescent as well. Some of the Kassite rulers of Babylon had Indo-Euro names, the Mitanni were Indic and probably the ones to introduce the chariot to the area. Some of the Pharaohs in the eighteenth dynasty married with Mitanni royals. Pharaoh Akhenaten was a religious heretic who worshipped the Sun disk that seems similar to the Indo-Euro worship of the sky father.

Akhenaten’s son was King Tut whose DNA was recently extracted and it revealed some of the known sister marriage of the pharaohs. Hawass did not want to publish detailed DNA information that revealed Tut’s ancestry. A leaked source had claimed that Tut was Y chromosome R1b which is a probable Indo-European source.

There is a more probable interpretation of the Nebra Sky disk than the current one. The Disk appears to represent the sky as it would be seen in the solar eclipse of April 16, 1699 BCE. The disk is made from copper that came from Austria and the disk was found in Germany. It was found with 3 different types of swords ( a collection perhaps). Interestingly, the eclipse of 1699 BC was not total in Europe, but it was in Egypt. The center of totality was within a few miles of the Upper Nile River Valley per the NASA eclipse database. The disk also had motifs similar to the Indo-European notion of the solar boat.

Yeah, I agree. As I mentioned previously, I’ve always though of the Hyksos to be Indo-Europeans. Hence the red-haired pharaohs and the later mention of “red-skinned” peoples of Libya.
In fact the Sea Peoples may have been early Indo-Europeans…

Would a Golden Family really be neccessary? On a time scale of even a few hundred years anyone who has children surviving into adulthood is going to wind up having lots of descendents. Moreover, looking at historical IE cultures, it would seem that they had a great diversity. Despite a close physical proximity and active trading and warfare, Greeks, Indo-Aryans, Indo-Iranians, Italics, Celts, Germanics and other IE speakers zealously maintained their separate identities and traditions. Unlike other peoples who pursued a bigger-is-better strategy, IE speakers were always fracturing into small groups. And even when they did pursue a bigger-is-better strategy, with the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Empires, it never took very long before fracturing resumed.

Donald Ringe’s cladistic reconstructions of Indo-European (cited in David Anthony’s book, but you can track down more recent stuff online), which seem like the best bet to give more-or-less correct branching orders (but not dates), have Indo-Iranian nested deep inside the tree, with Balto-Slavic as a close neighbor. This would seem to fit with a history in which eastern Battle Axe types migrate further east, through forested lands north of the steppe, and eventually contribute to founding the Sintashta culture in the Urals, the likely Indo-Iranian urheimat. David Anthony’s archeological reconstruction (pp 371-389) also fits this scenario. This would be instead of Proto-Indo-Iranians being guys who stayed behind on the steppes. Of course linguistic and cultural ancestry doesn’t have to match genetic ancestry all that well.

Also of note, in Ringe’s work Germanic is uniquely unruly. It keeps jumping between close-to-Italo-Celtic and close-to-Balto-Slavic, suggesting Proto-Germanic might be some kind of hybrid.

David Anthony. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press

High. One of the ironies of people now talking about ANE as a sign of Indo-Europeans is that in Europe it tends to peak in Finno-Ugric speakers. But then, blonde and ginger hair seem to peak in Finno-Ugric speakers as well.

This isn’t any contradiction to the ANE-IE theory, though, since linguistic reconstrunctions put Finno-Ugric and Indo-European homelands in contact and Finno-Ugric is not like the other non-IE languages of Europe/Anatolia in that it does share some basic vocabulary, the pronouns and some grammar with IE while eg Basque seems to have nothing to do with IE. It’s very plausible that the original FU speakers and the original IE speakers were genetically similar or even the same.

Both hypotheses come up, but the genetic relationship is usually considered the probable if unprovable. Most texts discussing suggested genetic relations between families usually contain a line such as “If another family were proven to be connected to Indo-European it would by far most likely be Finno-Ugric; if it was another family then one of the prime hurdles would be explaining the lack of connection to Finno-Ugric.”

Finland was the last place in Europe to abandon hunter gathering I believe. And it is not simply uniform blonde hair in North Europe which is the problem.The diversity and proliferation of novelty is the unusual thing in Europe. Where one should expect the the highest amount of diversity need not concern us here although ‘A Decreasing Gradient of 374F Allele Frequencies in the Skin Pigmentation Gene SLC45A2, from the North of West Europe to North Africa.’ says “The highest allele frequency is observed in Denmark”.

SLC45A2 solute carrier family 45, member 2 [ Homo sapiens (human) ] “Mutations in this gene are a cause of oculocutaneous albinism type 4, and polymorphisms in this gene are associated with variations in skin and hair color. Multiple transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been found for this gene”

The Interplay between Natural Selection and Susceptibility to Melanoma on Allele 374F of SLC45A2 Gene in a South European Population “In order to assess also the association of L374F to hair or eye color, we genotyped a subset of 344 individuals from which we had paired information for these traits. We observed that the ancestral allele G (374L) was associated with black (OR = 2.14; p = 0.0018) and dark brown hair (OR = 2.24; p = 0.0189), and the darkest eye color […] we observed that the polymorphism Leu374Phe (L374F, rs16891982) was statistically associated with skin color variability within this sample. In particular, allele 374F was significantly more frequent among the individuals with lighter skin.[…] The age of the expansion of the allele in this case was estimated to be of 16,480 years ”

To me the above implies that although the hair, eye colour diversity and skin color presently associated with west Europeans may have been present in some invaders, it originated in Europe.

Yes. I notice redheads are in difficult terrain and awkward shaped states whilst yellow-heads are on the plain in nice square states. Do you think the redhead density at the juncture of 10 southern states is a place of choosing (good camouflage in autumn) or do you think redheads were driven into mountainous (and/or cold) areas?

All the patterns regarding nwEuropeans are so striking that were it another group of people one feels these things would be axiomatic.

The blond regions in nwEurope, rather like LP stats, seem to radiate from a point location. Red hair seems more as if it is pushed to marginal locations, Wales, Denmark. Unless, is it possible? red hair actually came via the Atlantic coastal route from the Levant, having dropped down to the Levant from the Tarim Basin via east Iran.

Or the red layer extends all across the north but where it overlaps with a second layer radiating out of the Baltic it turns blond. That to me is the key question – does the distribution represent a red layer that is submerged in the mid part of its range or are the red areas islands?

” is it possible? red hair actually came via the Atlantic coastal route from the Levant”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it originally came out of the middle east, spread widely and then declined except in some refuge regions.

Also, (somebody once told me) there are redheads on the islands off the coast of Portugal. So were redheads a beach-combing population or were they driven to the coast? I found a ref to a Medieval quote that was distinctly unPC regarding redhairedness so maybe redheads have always been marginalised (there seems to be a prevalence of robustness amongst some redheads too). But redhair seems set to survive well. Redheads have become the acceptable face of …plus, red does very well on mixing, the whole world could end up with red undertones.

Yeah, I’ve read American Nations, studied it; it’s the work you’ve done that most interests me. One small comment if I may, being not from US I could really have done with the maps being the same scale as I don’t have instant State-recognition so I often have to trace the boundaries to compare the patterns you describe. I only mention it in case there’s an easy way to do that but I’m not tekky so maybe it requires special software.

Interesting that folks from the north European plain ended up on the north American plain. Must be the result of what land was available when people turned up but, I wonder about people at that time deciding where to go and what factors influenced their decisions. And I wonder if the SWPL satire on camping is actually a throw back to pastoralism. It seems uncanny the way settlers took to the west. Maybe nwEuros just love a good campfire. It’s Grey’s comments that get me thinking this way, the way he tells the story of ancient migrations in a very graphic and human way. 🙂

You may not be aware of this, but possibly 1/2 of Scots-Irish or Ulster-Scots are not in fact of Scottish descent… they’re just repackaged Native Irish… and in some cases English.

How do I know this? Because I study Y-DNA, especially R1b-M222 and have matches in the South who are astounded to find that they are patrilineally of Native Irish descent, despite being Presbyterian…
What you have is various people who became Presbyterian, later calling themselves Scots-Irish to draw a line between themselves and Catholic Irish, especially Famine Irish.

My Southern relatives migrated to the US South in the period 1620 – 1750 mostly, or before the main Scots-Irish migration. I would suggest that the earliest settlers in the South were largely drawn from the Irish Midlands, both Native Irish and English settlers. The Irish Midlanders speak with a drawl, and use certain idiom that today is part and parcel of the Southern accent. It is in no way related to the Lallans accent of Scotland or Northern Ireland.

The Ulster settlers were from where the valleys were boggy, so they tended to choose the high ground, wrongly believing it to be better farmland. Nobody drove those people off, more the other way about.

Going back to the very early part of the expansion, and expanding on Cochran, it does look like there might have been a horse stage and a cow stage. In the horse stage, horse-riding and horse-milk-drinking warriors from the East (Khvalynsk?) conquer much of the western steppe, and set themselves up as rulers (Sredni-Stog culture), and do the same for a big chunk of the Balkans and Anatolia (which get pretty thoroughly trashed). At this stage, only ruling elites descended from the invaders are lactose tolerant. In the Western steppe, you get lactose tolerance increasing in frequency among the conquered folk, who eventually make the shift to intensive cattle pastoralism and milk-drinking (Yamnaya), and then the new tri-sectional society sends migrants to points west and north.

The bifurcated distribution of red hair strikes me as unusual. We all know it peaks in Northwest Europe (particularly in Scots and Irish) but it also peaks strongly apparently among certain groups in Northeast Europe – most notably among the Udmurts, but also to a lesser extent among the Komi and Mari.

Unless there were two independent mutations, this seems a unlikely distribution. Of course, what’s between the two groups is the Baltic and Scandinavia – where the blondest people on Earth live. The logical conclusion thus might be that red hair was an earlier mutation, and that to some degree blond hair displaced it. This seems logical, given we know there are evolutionary disadvantages to red hair (e.g., cannot suntan, so you’ll burn to a crisp everywhere that’s not dreary, overcast, and high latitude). Indeed, according to some maps I’ve seen, the hours per year of sunshine are significantly higher in the Baltic than they are either in the British Isles or Uralic Russia. And even before the new finds with archeogenetics, there were indications that the blond hair mutation was Neolithic (or more recent) while red hair may have been significantly older.

The question is when did these mutations arise? The presence of red hair among Uralics suggests that it existed in at least low frequencies among hunter-gatherer groups which had some ANE admixture. The blondness of Estonians and Finns might suggest the same about blond hair, but we have fairly good evidence that both groups actually had language shift away from Indo-European languages in late prehistory. So it may well be that blondism was a trait which either originated within or near the root of Indo-Europeans.

“The blondness of Estonians and Finns might suggest the same about blond hair, but we have fairly good evidence that both groups actually had language shift away from Indo-European languages in late prehistory”

Eh, what? We have zero evidence of this and we have some very good evidence against it, eg. we have evidence of some non-Finno-Ugric and non-Indo-European substrate language in areas that now speak Finnish. Eg. all large lakes in Finland seem to have non-Finno-Ugric and non-Indo-European names while you can find Finnic names for lakes in Russia in areas that now speak Russian, indicating two replacements, some paleo-European language replaced by what’s now Finnish and Russian replacing various Finnic languages.

There is no trace of Indo-European languages at all in historically Finnish-speaking areas of Finland in nature place names and all known language shifts have gone the other way, Finnic to Germanic or Balto-Slavic. Of course there is admixture from neighbors but no evidence of some language shift and plenty of evidence against some across-the-board IE substrate (why is there evidence of some other language then?).

As for redheads, it’s a single gene (and it is the same gene) so you just need to take that out to make a ginger blonde and drift and founder effects can alter frequencies of a single trait easily. The likelihood of founder effects / drift at work is very evident in how it seems to follow the branching of the Finno-Ugric languages, red hair is notably elevated from the “average” in the Permic branch and notably lowered in the Finno-Saami-Mordvinic branch. It is more or less guaranteed that you’d see such patterns in physical traits even if in a hypothetical scenario where population splits completely followed language splits with no admixtures etc.

Finland and Estonia have very high rates of lactose tolerance. In the case of Finland, among the highest in the world. This suggests that Indo-Europeans were pretty clearly part of the early population mix of both nationalities.

I think it is pretty widely understood that the present Finnish population descends from a relatively small population and is highly “inbred” by European standards. The group could have been at the extreme southern edge of Finland, and encompassed a mixture of (proto-Baltic?) farmers and Finnic hunter-gatherers.

As far as I know, the genetics of Estonians don’t even display the Siberian weirdness of the Finns, and look pretty much identical to Balts and Poles.

I did point out that Razib Khan was wrong on his blog. In this post actually thought the high ANE ancestry (ie “Paleolithic Siberian”) of Finns is a sign of recent East Asian origins of Finns and that the other parts of Finnish ancestry are Indo-European. This is just so wrong that you can’t possibly be more wrong and he must know it now as his latest posts are indeed about ANE as a sign of Indo-Europeans.

As for you, what reason do we have to suppose that lactose tolerance was

a) spread by Indo-Europeans? (if the original spread of Indo-European was connected to pastoralist inventions you wouldn’t expect them to have a high tolerance since then it would be new and not yet selected)
b) limited to Indo-Europeans? (after all Europe presumably had plenty of languages and cultures before, maybe Indo-Europeans even picked it up from elsewhere)
c) not under recent selection, destroying connections to languages (ie you would only need some admixture as a seed and you’d end up with another tolerant population)
d) not already transmitted from proto-Indo-Europeans to proto-Finno-Ugrians or vice versa? or some other earlier interaction?

(proto-Finno-Ugric has some early Indo-European loanwords for domesticated animals which might indicate some transmission of pastoralism. That might even be the original spark of the FU spread considering that eg reindeer herding seems to have been invented as an analogy with pastoralism.)

“As far as I know, the genetics of Estonians don’t even display the Siberian weirdness of the Finns, and look pretty much identical to Balts and Poles.”

Estonians have a high ANE component, the peak in Europe in the last study I checked, and no East Asian like component has showed up in studies so far. Finns and Saamis have some East Asian like component but it’s a small contribution and we have no proof yet of whether it’s Siberian in origin and from what time (there are after all several migrations from Asia in the archaeological record and they all could have left some genes behind).

Words like “Siberian weirdness” have especially little meaning here when we’re talking about the big discovery that ancient Siberians and today’s Siberians are very different and that the ancient Siberians or an ancient-Siberian-like component is a big component in Europeans while a modern Siberian-like component is not.

I’m not going to sit here and re-argue what Razib said, but he pretty clearly distinguished between the Ancient North Eurasian versus recent Siberian admixture within the Finnish population. His main point is since many Comb Ceramic/Pitted Ware areas now show no evidence of recent Siberian admixture (e.g., the kind that shows up on ADMIXTURE runs, not ANE), that the Siberian admixture must be post Comb Ceramic – and even post Corded Ware. Hence, it entered Finland only after Indo-Europeans did.

Now, you may be right that Uralic peoples in general originally had no recent Siberian admixture, and that came later through groups like the Nenets (if your post is the one I think it is). But this is requires an extra migration, and I think Occam’s Razor leans towards Razib’s side without more information (we know there is DNA from Karelian hunters soon to come, so some of this will be solved ASAP).

As to your wider points about lactose tolerance, some have merit. I do think the adaptation was such a game changer though that if it originated in the Uralic peoples we wouldn’t see Indo-European being so dominant today. The two groups did, however, have very close contact in the formative period. It may be that given the Uralic peoples were right next to Indo-Europeans as they were developing their impressive cultural toolkit they managed to adopt enough bits (both in genetics and artifacts) to remain competitive while more distant groups didn’t have a chance. Sort of similar to why more African megafauna survived, albeit on a much shorter scale.

You are right that Finns cannot be modeled as a mixed Siberian and Indo-European peoples. The Siberian component is clearly minor and peaks in the Arctic, far from the Uralic Urheimat. Finns descend from several Mesolithic and Neolithic European migrations and some Siberian migration. It is not known to what extent the Siberian component is connected to Uralic languages.

“The logical conclusion thus might be that red hair was an earlier mutation, and that to some degree blond hair displaced it.”

Or maybe added to it?

if red hair is a partial depigmentation couldn’t one variant of blondism simply be more depigmentation added on top of the original so red hair / green eyes -> blond hair / blue eyes?

If so you’d have a buried layer of red hair under the blond layer implying a population expansion leaving red islands (Ireland. Mari etc) perhaps in areas that were either unsuitable for a horse based pastoralism or were the last to be conquered?

Pretty sure that when you mix red heads and blue eyes, you are combining different genes for fairer skin, so that the after a short period of selection for vitamin D production, the descendents of the mix will be substantially whiter than either ancestral group.

But one gene has an effect on skin plus eyes and hair. Why the polymorphisms in this gene in relation to hair color? Moreover, “Our estimates for the age of 374F placed the origin of this allele in Europe within the last 10,690–36,070 years (with a selection coefficient of 0.0243) using the individuals from the Hapmap, and within the last 25,270–35,290 years (with a selection coefficient of 0.0127) using the individuals from the 1KGP. These estimations support the work by Beleza et al. [42], who reported that the age of the allele ranged between 8,260–31,780 years under a dominant model and between 6,188–26,964 years under an additive model,”

Quick, someone mention how this confirms the work of Joseph Greenberg (which is sort of does) and watch the pissed-off linguists charge into the comments, insisting that language and DNA have nothing, Nothing, NOTHING to do with one another…

Greenberg’s great, his work has been attacked on several levels, and to be sure, the way he did mass comparison meant you had to be insanely careful about data pollution, but some of his work did predict some later discoveries pretty well.

As far as linguists and DNA having NOTHING to do with language, sure current opinions are a bit of an over correction, but it’s an interesting comparison to one of my archaeology profs who would drill “Pots Aren’t People”, “I have chopsticks, am from China?” and similar rote drills about DNA vs physical culture into our heads.

Yeah, I’m sure that Greenberg made some mistakes, but I’m always amused at how much any mention of his work drives a certain kind of linguist up the wall. Some of them seem to take the position that, sure, he was more or less right about Africa, and he was more or less right about Eurasia, and it’s looking more and more like he was right about the Americas, but he shouldn’t have been, because his method wasn’t the approved one.

As for your old Prof, I had similar professors back in the 1970’s. I’ll bet they just hate DNA testing…

The “c” in century underwent a sound change very similar to what happened in the satem languages, but much later on. The change of /k/ to a sibilant affricate or fricative is crosslinguistically very, very common. However, it is typically motivated by proximity to a front vowel such as /i/ or /e/, or some similar sound, as in “century”. What makes the satem development unusual is that it happened across the board. I wonder if this had something to do with near-ubiquity of /e/ in Proto-Indo-European: although not every word with /k/ had it followed by /e/, there would have almost always been some closely related word where it was followed by /e/.

1) “It all started pretty far to the East. There, some crazy locals first tamed the horse”

I think it’s much more likely this occurred at the furthest edge of the farmers. As farming extends further into more marginal terrain the balance between crops and animals shifts until farming eventually tapers off and there are real word examples where ranchers on the edge of the farming zone recruit local HGs to be herders for them e.g. aborigines in Australia, Gauchos in South America. I think it’s more likely the farmers themselves were responsible for the HG -> herder transition. This would put the ground zero in East Ukraine.

Once the transition has occurred those first steppe pastoralists could expand dramatically to the east and as there would also be a lot of room for that expansion to the east so the center of gravity of the new pastoralist population would shift east also.)

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2) “These early horsemen were genetically similar to the Ancient North Eurasians, or as those who know have dubbed them, Sibermen.”

If the ANE as a whole were descended from the interior HGs of the mammoth steppe then they would have existed over a very wide range in the far north from the edges of western Europe all the way to Siberia with a center of gravity close to Siberia.

If so the segment that developed a horse culture and dramatically expanded everywhere a horse based pastoralism was suitable would be only one segment of ANE. If so there ought to be surviving populations also descended from ANE but distinct from the IE ANE in regions close to where the mammoth steppe zone used to be but which were not suitable for horse-based pastoralism e.g. mountains and marshes i.e. places like the Caucasus, bits of Scandinavia, that big marsh in eastern Europe I’ve forgotten the name of etc.

In other words I think it’s more likely the IE developed out of one segment of ANE and then expanded dramatically over the top of various other non-IE segments of ANE except in regions where a horse-based pastoralism wasn’t suitable so the source of the expansion isn’t necessarily related to the center of gravity of ANE and might be (likely was imo) from one of the edges.

(So I still think Hyperboreans is a better label for ANE than Sibermen.)

“The food of the Mongols also consists of milk prepared in various ways … When it comes to “white foods” (anything made from milk), almost everything is heated due to the brucellosis problem within the country. The only thing that they commonly drink raw is mare’s milk just taken from the mare when it is still warm.”

So maybe the benefit of lactose tolerance is proportional to the brucellosis problem in a particular region which is maybe proportional to the mixture of animal types in that region i.e. for example is the proportion of mares and cattle to sheep and goats ~ proportion of milk that can be drunk raw?

Hence (maybe) c. 30% LP on the steppe -> sweeping to c. 90% LP in regions where milk from mares and goats/sheep was replaced with milk from cattle?

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4) Also the R1b / R1a distribution looks like two waves so i think either

a) the Cucuteni of west Ukraine were R1b and (the IE variant of) R1a were the PIE of east Ukraine and R1a both spread unopposed to the east and at the same time gradually pushed R1b west eventually causing the demise of LBK in the process

or

b) Cucuteni were standard G farmers and R1b were the PIE around the Black Sea and R1a were originally further east (around the Caspian for example) and the Cucuteni farmers turned the R1b into pastoralist raiders (and got squished by them as a result) but at the same time pastoralism spread east changing the center of gravity in R1a’s favor eventually leading to them out-numbering R1b (on the steppe) and pushing them to the west.

Pesky facts, yes there is evidence of a certain amount of direct synthesis from indirect light bouncing UVB photons on parts of the eye. Of course, NEVER deliberately expose your eye to an unusual level of UV by looking at the sun or glare, (even in eye protection). As I understand it eye colour is not due to simple depigmentation, the colours are produced by complex Tyndall effect scattering at different levels of the reflecting surface of the eye.

But let me ask you this, why have Europeans got brown eyes green eyes, gray eyes and violet eyes? If it was to do with vitamin D there would be just the genetic adaptation that WORKED. Why are there multiple transcript variants encoding different isoforms on SLC45A2?

Once last time, red hair confers noticeably lighter skin while blonde hair does not, so why are blondes not less common than redheads, eh? but such fair skinned people synthesis no more less vitamin D for a given amount of UVB exposure ‘no significant correlations were found with constitutive or facultative skin pigmentation’. A large British study found actual lower vitamin D levels in the fair skinned at least partly because it seems ‘FAIR-skinned individuals also appear to be less able to make and process vitamin D in the body, regardless of how long they sit in the sun for’.

My understanding is there are three things which are thought change the color of eyes.

Melanin content. Can of course range from so heavy that your iris cannot be seen as separate from your pupil, to so light that the underlying structural color is evident).

Lipochrome content, which is a separate yellow-brown pigment. In eyes with a good deal of melanin, some Lipochrome results in the rare amber eye color. In eyes with very little melanin, it results in green eyes, as the yellow pigment combines with the blue structural color.

Underlying structure of the Iris. This is more controversial, but it’s thought the difference between blue and gray eyes is due to greater collagen deposits in the iris, so that instead of Rayleigh scattering the iris has Mie scattering. Presumably darker-eyed people have natural variation here as well, but the structural differences are hidden by pigments.

I’ve always wondered why pheomelanin, which redheads have in their hair and skin (freckles, etc) doesn’t also show up in iris color. It may be because the iris develops from the neuroectoderm, meaning developmentally speaking it’s closer to the brain than the skin, and thus covered by a different set of controlling genes.

Karl Zimmerman, If you can get brown eyed blondes with tawny skin then blonde hair can’t be a side effect of depigmentation for greater vitamin D synthesis. And as blonde hair is more common than red hair, vitamin D synthesis couldn’t explain red hair even if redheads’ fair skin gave them more vitamin D synthesis, which it doesn’t.

“If you can get brown eyed blondes with tawny skin then blonde hair can’t be a side effect of depigmentation for greater vitamin D synthesis. And as blonde hair is more common than red hair, vitamin D synthesis couldn’t explain red hair even if redheads’ fair skin gave them more vitamin D synthesis, which it doesn’t.”

Multiple responses to the same problem?

1) Fish -> no problem. Are brown eyes in Europe more common close to the sea?
2) An interior HG solution to the vitamin D problem
3) A farmer solution to the vitamin D problem
plus
4) side effect of combining solution (2) and solution (3)
plus
5) unintended consequence of hair and eye color diversity on mate selection

(nb if (5) existed and was mostly based on novelty then it would inherently balance out i.e. as blond went over 50% the novelty effect would reverse).

Canadian Amerindians that live on caribou which contains hardy any vitanin D are dark.

What is your evidence for saying that light skin makes more vitamin D? It doesn’t and there are two links above one a lab study and another a large scale study of British people that prove fair skin synthesises no more and probably less vitamin D for any given amount of sunlight.

Red hair goes with pale skin, possibly because it came from furry-as-a -bear Neandertals. But there has to be a shortage od one sex otherwise mate selection balances out

After reading the comments a third possibility occurs to me. What if a transition to pastoralism and the development of a horse culture were two separate events?

i.e. HGs on the edge of the farming zone get turned into pastoralists by the farmers. Steppe pastoralism (foot based) then spreads east until it reaches a population who mostly hunt horses and that population is the one which combines the two.

So in effect you’d have PIE north of the Black Sea adjacent to the farmers and the actual full IE further east?

Greg seems to have presented this as Europe, other than Southeast Europe (i.e. the children of Yamnaya / Corded Ware, I guess), as centum, other groups are satem. Seems not really the case? Instead centum binds together West Europeans and Southeast Europeans (including Armenians and Albanians), while satem everyone from Lithuania down to India.

If anything, centum seems kind of R1b / farmer while satem seems R1a. And centum is Bell Beaker territory, more or less. Another fit would be that centum territory is EEF territory proper, while satem territory is on a gaggle of other groups. But even those don’t fit the Tocharians.

If the idea is that the Botai-like culture contributed to the Yamnaya, that sounds plausible. Of course, its the bit of seeing the Tocharians as then coming from Yamnaya that sounds odd. Do the Tocharians go back out East from Yamnaya past the Botai area into Xinjiang? Not impossible, but a weird reflux. And surely, the Tocharian people were a vestige of a wider family, not just a little group who lost their way. If Tocharians do this, then does that alter our assumptions more pure Botai-like people being left to contribute to India at a later date?

On lactase, there’s some in Iberia by the Copper Age (25% in a sample on Pontikos’ blog), but I’m not sure whether these are Beaker influenced or what. Copper Age samples in South and West Europe tend to be Oetzi type EEF so far, but who knows if these particular samples were.

It seems like you have intensive dairying for sure among Neolithic farmer cultures, which is why the idea of the invention of pastoralism (as in, heavy use of dairying and domestic animals) made not that much sense, particularly the mixed pastoralism that is optimal for Europe. The invention of horse riding and raiding would perhaps make somewhat more sense.

Botai culture didn’t have any cows or sheep or goats, a pure horse culture, while Neolithic farmers did.

Apparently this also meant the Botai weren’t that nomadic, as nomadism is apparently more of an adaptation to protect animals that can’t stand harsh climates, more than driven by grazing (so the interwebs have told me), and was practiced by later herders who adopted a cattle, sheep and goat package in climates too harsh for these animals to survive (of essentially Near Eastern Neolithic origin). (http://www.carnegiemnh.org/science/default.aspx?id=16611 – Sedentary Horse Pastoralism)

So for the Botai themselves, horse riders. But perhaps not yet with enough social changes in the direction of mobility to be much cop as raiders (horse riding raiders might not work so well if you don’t live on the move and you can ride your horse fine, and raid long distances… but then the slow moving farmers come and burn down your even slower moving village).

That said, apparently the early Corded Ware Indo-Europeans out of the steppe IIRC weren’t big into horse riding by this stage, more oxen and wagons. So I wonder if they switched out a horse heavy steppe package for something cattle heavy and more Europe ready, by mixing with these ancient Ukrainians, and those that didn’t would’ve lost. Nick some innovations, then get a raiding culture, but with more of a heavy infantry and cattle raiding accent (how Irish? but also rather core Indo-European). Not sure about in India.

On Ancient “North” Eurasian, I think we’ll need more samples in West-Central Asia to determine whether this is really a “North” Eurasian clade or a “central” Eurasian clade that bleeds into the more populous at the edges, without really much of a exchange between them.

If it’s already in west-central Eurasia, no need to putz about with separate extra dispersals from way East. Just Yamnaya plus a cline of Early Neolithic plus extra “ANE” plus ASI (whatever that proves to be) that’s already in place.

“its the bit of seeing the Tocharians as then coming from Yamnaya that sounds odd. Do the Tocharians go back out East from Yamnaya past the Botai area into Xinjiang?”

Two waves?

Wave 1) A wagon based pastoralism spreads out of Yamnaya over a wide range – including the northern forest zone and the Tocharians.

Wave 2) At some later time somewhere within that wide range (Botai?) the full horse-based pastoralism develops out of the original version and expands over the top of the previous wave except in places where it is blocked from doing so for some reason (including the Tocharians).

(wild instant guess – enough water for the earlier oxen pulled wagons but not enough for horses?)

.

“It seems like you have intensive dairying for sure among Neolithic farmer cultures, which is why the idea of the invention of pastoralism (as in, heavy use of dairying and domestic animals) made not that much sense”

IIIRC the benefit of LP comes mostly from drinking raw milk – like mare’s milk on the steppe – dairying for cheese etc loses a lot of the lactose. So if people have other food sources and aren’t LP and are dairying for cheese etc then there’s no need for them to drink it raw to survive.

If so then I think selection for LP would be proportional to how critical it was to survival in a particular region at a particular time i.e. the presence of other sources of food or not.

Botai culture’s 4300 BC to 3100 BC, Yamna’s 3600 BC to 2300 BC. Tocharian languages have been tentatively linked to the “Afanasevo culture (c. 3500 – 2500 BC)”. Yaman or Tocharian being earlier than Botai seem out. They could overlap, but it sounds like the inception of sedentary horse pastoralism precedes them (presumably Greg took this into account when thinking of his chronology).

The Kalash have 0% of this allele in this sample. Wonder how that happened. Uyghurs hit 5%. Adygei (who are similar to populations about 27% ANE formally as per the initial paper on the ANE-WHG-EEF model) have about 11%.

Strongest frequencies are in Western Europe, then some sporadic Ural and South Asian populations (without much areal consistency), then the West African Fulani via a North African intermediary. Mozabites of North Africa 21%, around about the frequency of many the North Indian populations (see the figure in this paper – http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/1/249.full), but not as high as many Afghanistan-Pakistan populations.

High lactase persistence without the European allele is apparently present in the Arabian peninsula. The peninsula and East Africa, which would’ve been proximate to the Near East where dairying probably began seem to have had less of a hard sweep and more of a soft sweep for lactase – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23993196. Where people gradually adopt dairy over a long time scale, accompanied by natural population growth, there’s less room for a powerful mutant, probably of foreign origin, to sweep through selectively, because the lactase persistance level is already good enough. Unlike in the dairy periphery/frontier.

Do you see any patterns in the populations with high frequencies in the LCT allele and phenotype, in terms of your idea? The clear pattern is of low importance in more cereal agricultural areas (e.g. less in rye and millet heavy Slavland than the Netherlands) but any nutritive stress patterns beyond that.

“The Sredny Stog culture seems to have had contact with the agricultural Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in the west and was a contemporary of the Khvalynsk culture.”

“The expert Dmytro Telegin has divided the chronology of Sredny Stog into two distinct phases. Phase II (ca. 4000–3500 BC) used corded ware pottery which may have originated there, and stone battle-axes of the type later associated with expanding Indo-European cultures to the West.”

“The culture ended at around 3500 BC, when Yamna culture expanded westward replacing Sredny Stog, and coming into direct contact with the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in the western Ukraine.”

.

I’m only looking at wiki pages rather than the archeological evidence so i don’t know but on the face of it that looks like it might fit the earliest adopters being a Cucuteni influenced group on the edge of the steppe who were later displaced by a full IE package coming out of Yamnaya.

.

“The Kalash have 0% of this allele in this sample. Wonder how that happened. Uyghurs hit 5%. Adygei (who are similar to populations about 27% ANE formally as per the initial paper on the ANE-WHG-EEF model) have about 11%.”

I don’t think ANE = IE. I think IE developed out of one segment of ANE so it’s a useful marker for IE generally but not always so there should be scattered HG descended groups of ANE who didn’t go through a steppe LP phase at all or pastoralist descended groups who didn’t develop NW Euro or Bedouin levels LP for specific reasons.

The reason I mentioned earlier was having to heat milk to stop brucellosis. Mongols for example apparently only drank mare’s milk raw, other milk they heated so that provides a test question – does the frequency of brucellosis vary with different animals and/or climate or region and/or are the symptoms easier to recognize in some animals but not others etc.

If the cost of drinking the milk raw is higher than the benefit then there’d be no pressure to select LP.

.

“Do you see any patterns in the populations with high frequencies”

I think the clue here is the desert Bedouin and camel milk with the emphasis on the word “desert”.

Basically I think evolution generally takes the path of least resistance and necessity is the mother of evolution so if there is no need for LP (i.e. there are alternative food sources) then it doesn’t happen (or rather it happens randomly all the time but doesn’t spread) so initially I think it would be the lack of alternative food sources that would drive LP to fixation. Later on when other food sources become available it might turn into a bonus – lots of basically free calories for almost zero extra work – but initially a necessity.

For example say people need 2000 calories each a day and they have milk which can be either 800 LP calories or can be turned into 400 non-LP calories of cheese (or some other food source that doesn’t require LP) then

region B) produces 1400 calories from other food sources per person plus 400 from cheese = not enough but if one person was LP they could drink all their milk raw for 800 calories and have 200 spare from other food to give to a non-LP person -> pressure for LP to spread to half the population

region C) produces 1200 calories from other food sources -> pressure for everyone to develop LP and get the other 800 from drinking the milk raw

.

So looking at a map of the spread of LBK why not all the way to the Atlantic coast or all the way north?

Answer – maybe those regions at that time were effectively deserts as far as neolithic crop farming was concerned. And if you look at the distribution of LP in Europe it peaks exactly where LBK didn’t reach.

IIIRC the benefit of LP comes mostly from drinking raw milk – like mare’s milk on the steppe – dairying for cheese etc loses a lot of the lactose.

To make cheese you need to have a large tub to store the milk in. The milk needs to be pastured over heat in some sort of metal pot. Then you need to squeeze out the water in a cheese press. Then you need to wait for it to ripen. Then you can haul your tub, pots, cheese press, and tons of cheese to your next destination. Your milk-drinking neighbors have a much more convenient, mobile lifestyle.

IC wrote: “Lots of people with strong ideology will not like your post and photos. But truth is stubborn and can not be explained away.”

We ideologues are lumpers, not splitters. For us, the big picture has been clear for at least a generation:

Human beings favor grassland. It is the environment that first made us human. It is an environment of great strife, but even greater opportunity for those who can deal. Grasslands breed warriors. And they are the environments most humans find the most beautiful. Great warriors get the beautiful girls.

Tropical grasslands have that too, but well, they’re in the tropics. So lop off a standard deviation or two in the mean IQ of the inhabitants – far less need for advanced prefrontal planning functions in a one or two season climate.

A temperate zone grassland that stretches east-west will therefore favor intelligent warriors, fairly similar in their origins, striving back and forth for dominance.

The Great Steppe is the only such large patch of grassland on the planet.

Ultimately because the earth turns west to east, the western portion of the Great Steppe is the most fertile and desirable portion.

Put it all together and it is obvious why the most influential warriors the world has known came from the Western Steppe. It is the planet’s best breeding ground for intelligent, warlike, barbarian beauty. The gradual civilizing of the immense vital capacity of these people as they expanded led in a direct line to events like conquering Pelasgians, citizen soldiers, intellectual admiration of beauty, admiration of the beautiful reality of nature, Plato and Aristotle, Newton and Darwin. Their descendants, far more than any other people, created what has been greatest in the world since Mycenae at least – four millennia.

Whether their ancestors originated a few hundred miles east or west of the Volga, a few centuries earlier or later, mixed this Steppe tribe with that Steppe tribe or that tribe with this, rode to battle or rode in battle, all in the millennium or so they were mixing it up in the Great Steppe before and during their great expansion, is all just detail on the big picture. Fascinating and important detail, but still detail.

If the big picture has been known for decades and guessed at for centuries and this truth remains the ultimate evil according to the Cultural Marxism that now rules us, I doubt new details will change attitudes much.

Since when do human beings favor grasslands? The sort of hunting and predator avoidance needed to survive might be intelligence-building, but it’s stressful, risky and energy-consuming. On the contrary, human beings have always been attracted to fertile valleys with running water — in more primative days the food grows on trees or can be plucked out of the water with a net; with the advent of farming they’re frequently ideally suited to growing a wide variety of crops; later still they’re good for trade, communication and defense.

Find a river, especially an estuary, and you will find human beings is great quantities. I think the only the ones that haven’t seen a great deal of development are some in Siberia, where it’s too cold to do anything, and the Amazon, where the soil is too poor to support much of a population.

I was linking the rise of these warriors of the Western steppe to the most accepted theory of human origins as upright, savanna apes. I had a few threads in mind, for instance the research referenced by Pinker that suggests children from diverse human groups find grasslands to be the most attractive landscapes.

But your point about river valleys is a good one, especially in regard to hypotheses that may complement the main theory of our origins: contributions here and there from riparian or estuarine ways of life, for example.

Very likely I should have been more restrictive: warriors favor grasslands and grasslands breed warriors. This is true in comparing the common chimp to the bonobo, and it’s true in comparing Steppe herders to settled populations of natural slaves and decadent masters in fertile river valleys. My guess is that it’s been true for ‘all three chimps’ for 5 million years or more.

Most humans fight wherever they are, and those who don’t are natural slaves, like the Amish (who don’t come from the plains, but rather the mountains of Switzerland and whose reproductive success in NA is temporary – their passive attitude, if extended, will eventually lead to what it did for all Anabaptists in Europe: near extinction).

But some humans are conditioned by their environment to fight better than others. In a smaller way, the Bedouin have been to the settled people of Arabia what the Aryans were to half the world. If anything, their nature supports my idea. Their grassland was just really, really hot, dry and sparse.

As for the Vikings, there is direct cultural and genetic continuity from the expansion out of the Steppe to the settlement of southern Sweden, a plain that was for two millennia the breadbasket of the Germanic world, to the Migration Period, to the Vikings. Same ‘strategy’, almost identical genes, different techniques.

And in regard to the Gurkas, I don’t know much about them, but from the little I do know, I’d guess they are like Swiss mercs – mountains breed defensive fighters who can then occasionally be hired by Rome or the Raj for offense (those who will fight at all – their more warlike Swiss brethren were quite right to persecute my Anabaptist ancestors, who often sought special farming status while contributing no young male blood) . But mountains do not breed aggressive world conquerers.

So, ANE merged with WHG in the Ukraine in the Yamnaya period, but there were previously ANE in Anatolia, and in south-east Europe finishing off Gimbutas’s peace-loving matriarchy. The ANE+WHG fusion then charged into northern Europe and finished off the job. I do not know anything about the genetics of it, but not so fast about centum and satem.

To begin with, which group spoke Indo-European, ANE or WHG? There is no consistent morphological distinction between words with horse-wheel-warrior-shaman associations and homestead-agriculture associations. Both categories contain words with plausible internal etymologies (roots producing both nouns and verbs) and others suspected of being loans (the direction of borrowing is seldom clear and cultural loans often travel far).

It is still less evident that the centum languages are associated either with agriculture or northern Europe. Hittite is centum, Balto-Slavonic is satem and the proto-language was neither. One word for honey has Semitic relatives, the other is native, yet the Semitic word is found in Chinese via Tocharian. One word for horse, markos, is found in Celtic, Germanic – and in East Asian languages. The other, ekwos, is found in all the dialects and also in Semitic and possibly Sumerian, but in the satem form asvas (eg Hebrew sus).

There is a fascinating isogloss on just about every page of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, and all the genetic evidence needs to be put together with all the linguistic evidence. Oh for somebody with the breadth of knowledge to do it.

The modern Irish Gaelic word for horse is “Capall” – pronounced “KOP-el” – which is a cognate of the Iberian and French term for horse – Caballo – and is not Indo-European in origin. It is found in Cavalry and so on. IIRC, there was an older word used in early Goidelic that was nearer to Ekwos.

Also, IIRC, the Tocharian word for horse was “Yakwe”, and that seems to have been applied to the small bovine we know as the “Yak”.

Here’s a thought, if the original ANE-IE speakers derived from further East than Yamna – which I believe – might not they have applied their word for bovine to the strange steppe cow, we know as a horse. Might the ethnology be from Yakwe –> Ekwos –> Equus.

The Greek word for Horse is Hippo, when Greek speakers first encountered a strange river-horse in Africa, they named him Hippo-Potamus, River-Horse…

Satem is conventionally seen as an innovative areal feature of some eastern IE languages. “Areal” because the satem languages show no signs of being close to each other besides their common satemy.

In addition to its geographical absence from the peripheries, the innovative nature of satem is implied by typological concerns: given that “ḱ” (conventional PIE spelling) is considerably more common than “k”, it seems likely “ḱ” was originally /k/ and “k” was originally “q”. In the scenario, Centum /q/ merged with /k/ while Satem /k/, as part of a chain shift, was fronted to /c/ or /kʲ/ and then to a sibilant. The development /k/ to /c/ in all positions is unusual, but assuming it is original to PIE simply pushes the same problem back in time.

Indo-European isoglosses often fail to line up neatly into groups, implying that some or all of them are areal rather than genetic traits. For instance, Indic and Greek have a few interesting similarities: the three-way plosive contrast, a very similar accent system (which is presumed to be the original Indo-European accent system), and Grassmann’s Law. The first is shared with Italic, Germanic, and probably Armenian, but the other two are are exclusive to Indic and Greek (plus some slight evidence of the accent system in Germanic) which is particularly striking. The accent system is believed to be archaic, but Grassmann’s Law is clearly an innovation. Despite these similarities, Indic is satem while Greek is centum.

None of this proves anything, but it gives the background for why satem is normally seen as innovative and areal.

If you imagine a plain white oval shape on an east-west axis and a circle of light blue forms at one point in the oval and then spreads in different directions to fill the whole oval and then later a dark blue circle forms a little way off from the first and then expands over the top of some but not all of the original spread then you might end up with patches of light blue that used to be adjacent to each other only surviving around the edges of the oval and now very distant from each other (or dotted around in little islands within) with the dark blue everywhere else.

“Canadian Amerindians that live on caribou which contains hardy any vitamin D are dark. What is your evidence for saying that light skin makes more vitamin D?”

Dunno. Copying other people mostly hence wondering about other options – like the eyes. It did always seem odd to me that light skin should help in regions where you’d assume people would wrap up the most because of the cold – except the face.

Fish contains other things which you don’t get much of in other foods so maybe vitamin D is a red herring.

Another semi-random thought is if you’ve ever done any sailing you’ll know that you can tan very fast because of all the sunlight reflecting off the sea – which I imagine happens on snow too?

googling snow blindness

“The SAS Survival Guide recommends blackening the skin underneath the eyes with charcoal (as the ancient Egyptians did) to avoid any further reflection”

So if that’s what you do if you’re getting too much then alternatively might lightening the skin under the eyes to cause more reflection into the eyes help if you weren’t getting enough?

so just for the sake of argument if it was the eyes the sequence would go

1) sunny latitudes: dark eyes and dark skin near the eyes (rest of skin as a side effect)
2) cloudy mid-latitudes: lighter eyes and lighter skin near the eyes (rest of skin as a side effect)
3) cloudy but snowy far northern latitudes: back to dark eyes and skin again because the low sunlight is greatly magnified by snow (and water as they’d mostly survive on fish that far north)

The Vikings/Saxons/Moorish etc raiders came by ship, fought on foot, then escaped by ship – early horse riders could have done the same.

Raiding will generally involve surprise and a sudden temporary local superiority in numbers so raiding doesn’t necessarily need an extra military advantage for the actual fighting. Raiding advantage lies in being able to raid from far away and then get away afterwards before reinforcements show up so horse raiding, sea raiding or even raiders coming down from the mountains on foot and then running back up again all have that same advantage. The actual cavalry stuff like stirrups etc might provide an extra fighting advantage on top but you don’t need that for raiding imo.

It seems to me evolution would naturally tend to increase the frequency of “natural raiders” whenever there is a reproductive cost benefit advantage to raiding (and reduce it when there wasn’t) but it’s a euphemism for psychos imo.

Horses were useful for chariots in ancient warfare. While it’s possible early riders could have dismounted to fight on foot, I think this would present some logistical challenges that would negate any advantage because the truth is, horses aren’t much good for long distance transportation. When you ride a horse over a distance you have to keep a slow and steady pace because if you ride them too hard they die. A horse that’s been pushed to its limit has to be cared for. Historically, people who fought on horseback walked to the point where the charge was to start and then mounted up. They also usually had more than one horse and a support system of pages or attendants to take care of equipment — kind of extensive for early nomads.

Before the stirrup or chariot and without the backing of a settled culture you want to use horses in a way that makes sense: as pack animals. The ability to use horses and oxen to draw carts that can be filled with weapons, food stores and trade goods is a huge advantage. Even the largest, most technically sophisticated army in the world is useless if they have nothing to eat and no way to keep their weapons in good order or replace broken ones.

In every picture I can find of the Comanche they have stirrups, which isn’t surprising since they got their horses, saddle designs and methods of riding from the Spanish, according to Gerald Betty in “Comanche Society”, who had stirrups for centuries before coming to America. Moreover, if the PIE speakers didn’t need stirrups, why would they have bothered inventing something as complex, sophisticated and fragile as the chariot? And even once you had invented it, it had a difficult and unforgiving learning curve.

Stirrups are useful, but you can ride without them: people did for millennia. Plains Indians rode bareback, some of the time.

For raiding, you don’t need to fight from horseback – just get there first with the most men.

Just a bit ago, you were claiming that horses aren’t much good for long-range transportation. But the Comanches, and for that matter all kinds of nomads in the Old world, prove you wrong. If you knew anything at all about the subject, you would already have known that.

And here’s a hint: if you’re going to try and slip past a ban, you won’t do it by endlessly repeating the same crap as you did before you were banned.

steppe / sea, same thing practically speaking hence the similarities (imo) between the waves off the steppe and the waves from the north sea into Britain (both driven by the balance of psychos combined with farmer pacification over time imo).

“When you ride a horse over a distance you have to keep a slow and steady pace because if you ride them too hard they die.”

I expect they’d set fire to stuff during the raid so when reinforcements arrived they had to decide between chasing or stopping the barns burning down. That still happens today during riots except it’s generally jewelers rather than barns.

Red hair is linked with light eyes and skin and is most common in the Scottish borders. It is also sex linked–women are more likely to be red haired.. (I have heard of red haired men dyeng their hair black. Women tend to do the opposite, ie go from natural dark to fake red.) By my way of thinking that shows that hair colours came from sexual selection acting on women in Europe back in the Ice age. No one seems to be spelling out an alternative explaination.

It’s common for men with brown hair to grow a red beard. what does that tell us about genes and selection? does it mean red has dominance in regard to secondary sex characteristics? that would be an important role?

I think, could be wrong, that Grey’s idea is that :
-reds were a widespread early population (his light blue islands above),
which could, I think, fit with Peter’s writing about sex selection on the Steppe
although Grey said he thinks red spread from mid-E not Steppe.
You think sex selection for red came later in Europe?

[btw Am I right in assuming that bog bodies were not red-haired but went red because of the peat?]

what about the idea that red is an old colour (eg orangs) and when the gene to make black lost dominance, the old red gene popped up again. and sexual selection in that case would be for the purpose of tribe selection?

What is the use of red hair, that is the question. “Previous research had shown that the melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R) gene plays a key role in protecting melanocytes from UV-induced DNA damage.Under normal circumstances MC1R binds to and protects another gene well known for its ability to suppress tumours, PTEN. The new work demonstrates that the red hair version of MC1R no longer acts as a PTEN guardian.
‘As a result, upon UVB exposure, we saw an increased destruction of PTEN in the mutated pigment cells,’ said Dr Wei….: ‘Together, our findings provide a possible molecular mechanism as to why red-haired individuals harboring MC1R mutations are much more susceptible to UV-induced skin damage than individuals with darker skin, resulting in a 10 to 100-fold higher frequency of melanoma.'”

UVB is the wavelength that makes vitamin D. Think about that. Better still, red hair gives you cancer even if you stay in the dark

Red human hair pheomelanin is a potent pro-oxidant mediating UV-independent contributory mechanisms of melanomagenesis “The highest incidence of melanoma in red haired individuals is attributed to the synthesis and phototoxic properties of pheomelanin pigments. Recently, pheomelanin has also been implicated in UV-independent pathways of oxidative stress”

Elevated Plasma Levels of the Pituitary Hormone Cthrc1 in Individuals with Red Hair but Not in Patients with Solid Tumors” Cthrc1 levels in patients suffering from conditions that have an inflammatory or infectious component, e.g. fever, yeast and urinary tract infections, thrush, etc., and even diabetes can be included in this category [19]. In this context it should be mentioned that the promoter region of Cthrc1 contains a putative NF-κB binding site located within 300 base pairs upstream of the transcriptional start site, however, its function has until now not been examined. Combined these findings suggest a link between Cthrc1 levels and inflammation.We identify Cthrc1 as a marker for activated stromal cells. Cthrc1 is a pituitary hormone with significantly elevated levels in subjects carrying variant alleles of the melanocortin-1 receptor as wells as in patients with inflammatory conditions.”

Perhaps Red Hair was under selection in Central Asia for an altogether different reason?!

Red Hair is associated with differential pain receptors, in that red haired individuals are more tolerant of blunt force trauma, but less so of piercing pain. Suppose Red Haired individuals were especially good at wrangling wild horses???

Neanderthal, who also known to get up close and personal with large animals, and skeletons show many broken bones, and they too had red hair…

Interesting. The research you indicate seems to point to red being a disadvantage. But, combined with brown, observationally, it seems to have become widespread and relatively successful. Anyway, thanks for this and other replies/extracts.